Where It All Began - My First Steps Into The Fog
Today I want to talk about when, in my opinion, my depression started.
Looking back the first signs of a depression showed up back in 2014. I just finished a two year long continuing education to become a certified industrial engineer. I finished the education program with a good degree but despite that, I wrote for almost one year job applications without any luck of getting a job.
This experience of not getting a job and seeing other members of my class getting jobs in less than a few months, wore hard on me and my self-confidence. At the same time we were told that the industrie is looking for people like us and we will find a job in no time. For me this wasn’t the case, unfortunately. Most of the time I got rejected with a standard phrase, without being able to introduce myself.
I believe it was October or November 2014 that I finally got a job in a little company as a desing engineer. Glad to have found a job and not having to accept an offer of a temporary employment agency, I overlooked the downsides of the job and company.
From the second month on I didn’t get paid and still kept working at the company for a few more months, afraid of searching for a job again. During this months I lost roughly 10 kg due to the stress and long working hours.
Eventually (early 2015) I quit the job at the company as my savings were dropping fast and I needed to earn money, which ment writing applications again and being faced with meaningless rejections from companies.
After a short while I was able to find another job as a desing engineer in a company with six employees, but I was very unhappy with the job and kept it only to have money until I found something different.
During the summer of 2015 I changed my job from being a design engineer to become a service technician for a manufacturer of industrial grade 3D printers. For the first months I was happy and the job was very interesting, as the 3D printing technology is a small hobby of mine.
After about 10 or 11 months I got unhappy, the constant travelling, the constant jetlag, the stress and lack of sleep took a toll on my mental as well as my physical health. Mentally it was a hard gut punch, as it was another job that didn’t make me happy or fulfilled me in the end.
I started to look around and was open to change the company, with the hope to find a job that requires less travel and would earn me a bit more money.
By the end of 2015 I changed the company again. At this point the fog started to thicken, full of self-doubt and struggles to get motivated or finding enjoyment in small things.
In the end the job at the new company turned out to be a nightmare, I was less time at home and had even more stress compared with my previous job. My physical health declined rapidly, I got backpain with numbness in my left leg and loosing a lot of weight again.
My mental health wasn’t any better, I hated myself for taking this job. I was disenchanted from my life, I hated myself for the decisions I made so far and my thoughts were goning crazy, especially when it was time to go to sleep. What should I do next? How can I continue?
At some point I had to call in sick, as I was barely able to move with the backpain. During the time of being ill at home, my mental health declined rapidly and before I knew it, I was trapped in deep in the fog.
In the next part we will talk about what happend to me while struggling with the fog and which steps I took to move forward.
So stay tuned for that.